Blue Ticket

by Sophie Mackintosh

  The next day Doctor A came back. I wished not to be glad to see him. He took me to a different room. There were two chairs padded with red vinyl, a small square table, a counter with a hot plate and a pot of brewing coffee, with biscuits laid out neatly in rows. The room was long and the furniture only took up the first third, with space yawning behind us, as if for an audience. I could imagine more chairs set up, a conference on my badness taking place, my fate decided.

  My grief pulled me underwater once again. Nova.

  Where is she? I asked Doctor A, but he acted as though he had not heard me. He took the further chair, his legs spread wide open, and I sat down opposite him. Leaning forward, he pulled the table to one side, so that there was nothing in between us. It seemed to take him no effort at all and this worried me. I was pulling in information from my surroundings, anything that could be of use. Beautiful day, he said, looking outside.

  On the table lay a long, black hair. I stared at it, wondering who it belonged to. Doctor A watched me with a detached interest. I wondered if he could still predict my behaviour, if there was a pattern women like me repeated. I wondered how many women had sat at this table with him.

  Without the flat weight of Nova attached to me, I felt lopsided already. That was how it worked, when something had been cleaved from your body. I was crying openly but silently. What else could my body be doing but that—the pouring of water, the shock of the separation.

  I wanted my baby. I wanted the white ticket and all it represented in my hand. I wanted to have been a bundle of hair and cloth in the back of a car all along, carried to safety. I wanted maternal instinct to have shone from me, infallible, undeniable, like a light. I would have done the unspeakable for her. Wasn’t that proof of something? I could see in the way Doctor A watched me that it was unbecoming to see someone like me have such feelings, like watching a dog taught to speak.

  Get a handle on yourself, he told me, with faint disgust.

  He walked to where the coffee was brewing and brought back two full cups and a jug of cream on a tray.

  You can drink this now, he said, handing one to me. It’s safe for you again.

  I didn’t touch it. There was stuffing leaking out from my seat and my fingers tangled in it. There was the blue sea, still, in my eyeline, out of the window.

  Where is she? I asked again.

  Doctor A set his cup down. You might be interested to know that another woman lives in your house now. She walked into the city and into that life. She’s grateful for the freedom it allows, in a way that you weren’t. She goes to her doctor like you came to me. She wears her locket and believes in it.

  In another life, as he carried on explaining to me, I had grown tired of R. I had carried on with my work. I had met a person I cared for, who cared for me too, and we had made a home. Not a white-ticket home, but a home.

  Or I had never met anyone I loved enough to settle down with, but I was fine with it. I made a different sort of home. I travelled, I had exciting affairs. I died alone and old and glad in my bed.

  You could have been happy that way, Doctor A said.

  But I would have had to live with the dark feeling every day, I said, my voice hard. Heavy in my stomach. Thinking of it always.

  Yes, Doctor A agreed. You would have carried it around. Maybe one day it would have dissolved. You would have forgotten it.

  But I wouldn’t have.

  Well, he said. No guarantee.

  It would have got worse, I said. It would have choked off everything.

  Maybe, he said. Maybe it would have got worse.

  It doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is Nova. I stood up, but he waved me back down with his hand. Don’t overexert yourself, he said.

  He carried on talking about pointless things, about R in his high, clean apartment—how sometimes in the evening he poured whisky into a thick glass and walked around after three of these glasses or so, not going anywhere. There was a white-ticket woman, I had been right. It might have been my fault that there was. I might have put the idea in him.

  He’ll have a baby and he’ll push it around in a big pram, Doctor A said. It just won’t be yours.

  There was no cruelty in his tone. There didn’t need to be. He was just relating a fact.

  What will happen to Nova? Is she all right? I asked. There was nothing else I could think about.

  He sighed. You have to realize that Nova does not exist any more. You won’t see her again. She’ll be given to someone suitable, a real family, a real mother. One day she’ll pick her own ticket at the lottery. It’s too early to say what colour it will be, of course. I don’t know that yet. You never will.

  I laughed and it sounded like choking. It did not seem possible that we would never know each other, when we were already intertwined enough that her pain was my pain, that her cries summoned my milk, made me frantic with her need. I shut my eyes, opened them again, trying to reset the scene, to wipe it clean.

  Doctor A got up abruptly, walked to the other end of the room. Let me give you a minute, he said. He put his hands on the windowsill, gazing outside.

  She was gone. I had failed. I thought about what I could have done differently. About keeping myself alone, speaking to nobody, no hotels, no men in those hotels, no Marisol, no women dead on the ground. I thought about the survival pack they had given me, the red tent and the map that was wrong and the gun almost too heavy for my hands. Those cruel objects saying to me: Go on then. Prove how much you want it, if you really do want it so much. A little joke. A little mercy. What was it all for, if not to teach us what it means to survive, what it means to push, what it means to love?

  What about earning it? I said aloud. You said. You said I could prove that I was good enough.

  Doctor A looked across to me. No, Calla, he said. Nobody told you that.

  He came back and sat down again in the same chair. He leaned in closer to me.

  You’re not meant to like your patients, but sometimes you can’t help it, he said. You ferry them along through each crisis. You know their lives better than your own. You hold their pain, teach them to reshape it. Sometimes the pain is too big.

  Fuck you, I said.

  I wish I could have helped you, he said.

  You could help me now, I said.

  No, I can’t.

  Fuck you, I said again.

  That doesn’t help anyone, does it, he said. Tell me that you understand what’s going to happen. That you accept it, that you give yourself over to it.

  I told him instead that I’d had agency over the things I had done all through my life, even if not over everything that had been done to me. I told him I was not a branch being broken in a stream, carried along by the water until it snapped. I told him he should give my baby back to me. I told him that some things couldn’t be seen in a person, that mistakes could be made, that there was no quantifying what made a true mother. I told him that he should give my baby back to me. I told him that having seen badness, having known badness and even at times been badness, I felt only the more compelled to keep my baby from it. That I couldn’t do anything about whatever crucial lack was inside myself—whatever had been seen or decided, sniffed out from my body or my brain or my soul—but I could do this.

  Give my baby back to me, I said again.

  He leaned forwards, took my twisting hands in his, and my whole body tensed.

  I’m going to tell you the truth, because I respect you, he said. You weren’t given a blue ticket because of anything you did or anything you are. It was random. It could have happened to any of you. There’s no deserving. There is no order—at least not one that governs the lottery. There’s a yes and a no, and that’s all. And yet see how it became true, see how you fulfilled your destiny, how you even relished the blue, at first? Don’t interrupt me. I know that you were happy for quite some time.
But you couldn’t accept it; you thought you were better than what you were given.

  So I could have been a white-ticket all along, I said.

  And you probably wouldn’t have been happy with that either, he said. You’ve always wanted more.

  I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t have the energy to even try. What are they going to do to me? I asked instead.

  He smiled. He looked tired too, suddenly. It’s over, Calla, he said. They’re not going to do anything. Try to relax.

  I don’t understand.

  Haven’t you remembered what it’s like to be cold, alone, in danger? he said. Don’t you feel you’ve been punished enough? But it’s all right. You’ll be taken to a new city and given another chance to make your own life. Try to appreciate it this time.

  I thought about the weeks on the road, believing that Nova and I could make it, that the life we wanted was out there ahead of us. The quiet green of the months in the cabin, my daughter growing inside me, every day alive. My punishment. Doctor A’s face hovered in front of me, oblivious. How could he not know that that punishment had been the best and truest part of my life? Possibly I was not the sort of person who should be a mother, but I had heard what was calling through my body and I chose the burden of it. I chose freedom, even if to some it looked like the opposite.

  He released my hands, shuffled his chair slightly closer to me. I always liked talking to you, he said. It’s all such a shame. I thought you had potential. Sometimes I made admiring notes.

  This seemed so ridiculous that I started to laugh, which turned into crying again. I wanted to lie down. I was so weary.

  Do you have any final requests, while we’re here? he asked. He paused, meaningfully. You haven’t asked about the girl you were with.

  Marisol, I said. My mouth was dry, the name unfamiliar. Eyes sore. I didn’t want to know how he knew about her.

  She’s a doctor, as you know, Doctor A said. Or she was. Quite a senior one, as it happens. And she made a bargain with us. He looked at me expectantly.

  What sort of bargain? I asked. I hated having to ask, to beg for the information. She persuaded them to let her go?

  I know this is difficult to hear, he said.

  It’s not, I lied reflexively. He raised his eyebrows.

  Fine. She had been doing good work before she got pregnant, and she sensibly decided to carry on doing that work. She would find fugitive women on the road and deliver them to us—gaining their trust and leading them to places where they would be picked up. She was extremely good at it, as we knew she would be. Just a few months’ service. In return, she could keep her own baby, and the two of them could leave the country.

  I thought about the first woman I had seen with her, their heads pressed close, formulating a plan. About Marisol driving her to a dark place where the emissaries waited and then driving on again, in a new car, the woman left behind.

  She trapped me, I said.

  She almost didn’t, he said. She went off the grid for a long time after she met you. We were curious about whether she had done something stupid. Out of character, for her. But in the end she came back to us, as we knew she would. She put her baby first.

  He reached for my hands again and held them tighter than before, so tightly that the bones shifted.

  You made it easy, in the end, for her to betray you, he said. That’s always been the sort of person you are. Even without your ticket, that was obvious in you from the start.

  The feel of my hands in his was the worst thing. I would rather have had his around my neck. Rosary of bruises, half-moon marks from his nails. The kindness was worse than the cruelty. There was genuine compassion in his eyes. Perhaps he would cry. I kept watching. He let go of my hands. He didn’t cry.

  2

  An emissary led me back to the room with the bed. She was small, blonde, chewed gum when she thought I wasn’t looking. I imagined overpowering her, seizing her gun and bringing the butt of it down on to her face. But my breasts were leaking, the skin tight as a drum and painful. I had to go at once to the bathroom and massage them, and watched with a sort of muted horror as milk fell from me into the toilet bowl, relieving some of the pressure. Then I sat on the bed in a circle of lamplight and waited for something. I counted to a hundred and then a thousand, and then counted backwards, emptying my thoughts, let the static of that monotony fill the air, but it didn’t work. I knew there should have been a sort of comfort in knowing, finally, that there had been nothing missing in me—nothing seen or judged, as I had been made to believe my whole life—but the comfort was abstract, cold, out of reach.

  I stayed in the room a long time before a knock came at the door. I pressed my eye eagerly to the tiny fishbowl lens but it was not Nova. It was Marisol. She was not staring back at me but looking at the floor, looking down the corridor. I stepped back from the door, sick, as she let herself in. She was dressed in the white coat of the doctors. She looked exactly how I had imagined: her hair pulled back, smooth. There was no baby with her, not mine and not hers. She carried a tray holding a foil-covered plate, two glasses of water, a packet of cigarettes.

  Hello, she said.

  Do you know where she is? I almost shouted it.

  Good to see you too, she said. She drained her glass of water, but I would not take mine when she offered it.

  Tell me, I said.

  She sat on the end of the bed. There was nowhere else to sit. She perched decorously, stiffly, legs crossed at the ankle, and laid the tray on the ground in front of her.

  Do you mind if I smoke? she asked.

  Yes, I said, but she lit one anyway.

  I watched her closely, trying to see the motherliness in her. She seemed very remote, though I knew objectively that I had touched her, that I had cared for her. I wanted to put my hands around her neck until she gave me answers. An echo of love, of anger, passed over me and then left.

  Where’s my baby? I asked again. Where’s yours?

  She blew smoke out, tilting her head away from me. Sleeping, she said. Another room.

  She unfolded the cover from the plate to reveal crustless sandwiches, stubbed the cigarette out on the crumpled foil.

  Want one? she said, offering it to me.

  What the fuck is wrong with you? I asked.

  I’m hungry, she said. You know what that feels like, I know you do. You’re the hungriest person I’ve ever met.

  She put the plate down, didn’t take one herself after all.

  Marisol. Why are you here?

  You want to see your baby, don’t you? she said. Come with me. I’m going to help you.

  We walked down the corridor together. There was nobody else there now. Marisol seemed at home in this place where nothing should have been at home. She moved decisively, gracefully. I hated her. She paused at a large wooden door, took a key from her pocket, put it in the lock and turned.

  The room was painted yellow, like the walls of the halfway house all those years ago. Muslin was draped from the windows and over the wooden cots lined up against the far wall. There were five cots, and only one baby. At once I knew her, even swaddled in new white cloth. She was wrapped in a complicated way, but her arms were free. I took her up and Marisol hung back, leaving me alone.

  The nurse is on her break, she said, staring at the wall.

  Nova in my arms was warm and delicious as a loaf of bread. Dopamine rushed my brain, dulled me, softened my edges. In my peripheral vision, Marisol fidgeted uneasily, half stepping towards us then glancing back at the door.

  Where’s yours? I asked.

  Not here, obviously. Marisol smiled. Let’s sit down for a minute.

  What? No. We have to get her out of here, now, before someone comes.

  Marisol shook her head. It’s not safe yet. We have to wait.

  We sat together on the floor, be
tween two cots. The only light came from a rabbit-shaped nightlight plugged into the wall socket, casting a gold blush. Nova was sprawled against my chest like a frog. The rhythm of my breathing seemed to soothe her.

  Do you remember the first time we saw each other? Marisol asked.

  Yes, I said. I was afraid of you.

  It might have been better if we had never met, she said.

  Better is relative, I said. It would have been different.

  I saw another journey, one where I had been very alone, one that had ended sooner, before I had a chance to meet Nova. Ended on the side of the road, or in the hotel with the man who hit me, or asleep in a bathtub, or pulled over by the authorities. I also saw a journey where I had made it, where I had been once more the girl with the scratched knees, ruthless, a thing of the dark. Where I had tunnelled through dirt and swum and stolen and hurt my way to freedom.

  I was afraid of you too, she said. I was afraid of everyone.

  Well, you didn’t seem it, I said.

  You can’t let anyone see that you are, or it will all be over, she said. You have to just pretend. But I’m still afraid. I am more afraid than ever. I can tell you now, because it doesn’t matter.

  It does matter, and I’m not afraid, I said, but didn’t know if it was true. Maybe I could be the brave one, for once. I knew that the dark feeling no longer seemed dark, that it was glowing, that I had seen and even touched the hot wet redness of the universe, but I didn’t want to talk about that with Marisol, even though she was a mother now too.

  Good for you, she said. Can I hold her?

  No, I said. I can’t forgive you, you know. Even by giving her back to me. You betrayed us.

  Only at the end, she said. Only when I had to. I betrayed others, that’s true. I did terrible things so that I could keep my baby. But the woods, and us, that was real. She shifted, looked away. But you left, and my baby was not moving, and I had to go back to them. I needed help, it was an emergency, and you had abandoned me. Of course, once I was there I had to tell them about you. Of course I did. I had to keep my end of the bargain. She looked up and her eyes were hard and wet. I don’t care whether you understand it or not. I know you would have done the same thing.